Speaker
Description
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is emerging as a key tool to support eco-design and sustainability assessment in the space sector. However, current practices remain fragmented and often limited to upstream phases, with insufficient consideration of in-orbit operations and end-of-life impacts. This gap hinders comparability across studies and prevents a comprehensive evaluation of the environmental footprint of space activities.
The development of Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules for space systems (PEFCR4Space) seek to harmonise LCA practices across the sector. By providing common methodological requirements, system boundaries, and impact assessment approaches, PEFCR4Space aims to ensure consistency, transparency, and comparability of environmental assessments for space missions.
This contribution explores how to extend the PEFCR4Space framework to better integrate in-orbit life cycle stages. It focuses on how concepts such as space capacity and state of the art debris-related indicators can be used to reflect the use and degradation of the orbital environment as a finite resource.
The alignment between current development in the field and the PEFCR4Space methodology is addressed by identifying relevant impact pathways, defining appropriate inventory data, and deriving potential characterisation models in compliance with the Environmental Footprint framework.
This approach supports a shift from partial assessments to a full life cycle perspective, covering all phases of space activities. By bridging environmental footprint methods and space sustainability metrics, this work supports the transition towards more robust, comparable, and policy-relevant environmental footprint assessments for the space sector.
| Which section would you like to submit your abstract to? | Session 12: “Towards the integration of all the open aspects in space sustainability” |
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